On Sense, Tone, and Accompanying Thoughts

The paper deals with Frege's distinction between sense and colouring or tone as applied both to proper names and to compound sentences. It argues that Frege's way of drawing this distinction is unsatisfactory, much for the same reasons as Grice's theory of conventional implicature is a non starter. The author suggests that tone may contributes to assertoric content depending on contextually specified circumstances. The phenomenon of linguistic underdetermination is very widespread, and tone is only the tip of an iceberg that we need to explore more fully. The paper deals with Frege's notions of sense and tone within the framework of recent theories of contextualism, literalism and multi-dimensionalism. Dummett's account of Frege's account of sense is reviewed and extended. The author suggests that tone differs from sense only as regards a higher degree of undeterdeterminationa and occasion sensitivity. Tone contributes to assertoric content, and differs from conventional implicatures, as described by Paul Grice and his followers.